Some unfortunate news is making the rounds today surrounding a potential delay of the upcoming Intel Ivy Bridge processor. A story over at Digitimes is reporting that due to an abundance of inventory on current generation Sandy Bridge parts, Intel will start to trickle out Ivy Bridge in early April but will hold off on the full shipments until after June.

If Intel is indeed delaying shipping Ivy Bridge it likely isn't due to pressure from AMD and with the announcement by top brass there it seems likely Intel will retain the performance lead on the CPU side of things from here on out. With the release of Windows 8 coming in the fall of 2012 Intel's partners (and Intel internally) are likely going to be using that as the primary jumping off point for the architecture transition.

If ever there was a reason to support AMD and competition in general, this is exactly that. Without pressure from a strong offering from the opposition Intel is free to adjust their product schedule based on internal financial reasons rather than external consumer forces. While we will still see some Ivy Bridge availability in April (according to Digitimes at least) in order to avoid a marketing disaster, it seems that the wide scale availability of the Intel design with processor graphics performance expected to be double that of Sandy Bridge won't be until the summer.

The arrival of the HD 7970 caused a bit of disappointment to some, not because of the performance of the card, instead it was the price that depressed many would be owners of the fastest GPU on the planet. That price is fair, currently the competition sells their top card, the GTX 580 for about $500 and as the HD7970 is faster charging a ~10% premium makes perfect sense ... now if only they could do something about the stock problems.

All is not lost GPU fans, DigiTimes has confirmed AMD's HD7950 should be here by the end of the month and will offer the same next generation architecture at a lower price. If it emulates the style of the HD6950 it will be a very popular card and will mean AMD beat NVIDIA to market with both enthusiast level cards. It will likely be sometime in April before we start to see Kepler based cards from NVIDIA, of which they are being fairly closed mouth about. We do know that they will be leading with mobile and mid-range chips, not the enthusiast level cards as AMD did, the reasons for that are widely debated.

Intel is also going to offer competition in the spring as they release Ivy Bridge with its integrated graphics. That may take a chunk of AMD's Llano market share but their high end discrete GPUs should be safe. NVIDIA on the other hand is vulnerable, if their mobile chips do not offer a significant advantage over Ivy Bridge's capabilities or cannot work in tandem with the chip then NVIDA's products will not be that attractive. Even worse, if their mid-range cards do not live up to expectations, they may find AMD's previous generation of cards and Intel's iGPU dominating the market segment NVIDIA hoped to keep share in.

2011 market shares from Jon Peddie Research

"AMD, after announcing 28nm high-end Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, is set to add a new 28nm member Radeon HD 7950 by the end of January, while Nvidia, considering the yield rates of the 28nm process and its inventory levels, plans to officially release its 28nm Kepler in April, at the latest, according to sources from graphics card makers.

The sources noted that Nvidia wishes to make sure that the power consumption and the manufacturing process of the graphics chip all reach perfection before entering the 28nm generation. Since Nvidia is set to release its 28nm graphics card around the same time as Intel's upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge processor, the sources believe Kepler series GPUs may have a chance to catch up with the demand for Intel's new CPUs."

MSI has two brand new boards they are showing off at CES 2012, the Z77A-GD80 and the Z77A-GD65. The first will be their new flagship motherboard and will feature new versions of ClickBIOS, their UEFI implementation and Multi-BIOS overclocking helper which will allow you to save profiles and recover from BIOS corruption. The board will continue their tradition of PCIe 3.0 compliance with three 16x slots and it will have four dual dual channel DIMM slots that can accept up to DDR3-2667. They've also included four USB 3.0 and four SATA 6Gbps ports for your storage needs.

The Z77A-G65 below sports the same overall features as the GD80 with some changes to the PCB. Looking to the top of the board you can see the GD65 lacks a heatsink at the very top edge but you can still see that MSI has used Military Class III components on the motherboard and the always on USB charging port.

*update* The missing link has been found that seperates the GD80 from the GD65 and that difference is none other than Thunderbolt. The Z77A-GA80 has Thunderbolt support, the new interface which allows an external peice of hardware direct access to the PCIe bus and will allow transfer speeds of up to 10Gbps. That speed allows the use of devices like MSI's GUS II, an external video card enclosure that comes with an expensive and sometimes hard to find Thunderbolt cable. That interface is not limited to GPUs, it will be interesting to see what use enthusiasts who purchase the Z77A-GD80 will put Thunderbolt to.

It might be hard to believe but the form factor everyone loves to talk about is on the lips on Intel reps everywhere at CES including the GM of the PC Group, Mooly Eden. The new ultra-thin form factor introduced by Intel this follows the design theory of the Macbook Air while trying to stay a PC at heart and has been received with mixed feelings. While it is nice to have an ultra-thin, ultra-light machine which is capable of running office productivity tasks at a good level of performance the attached price tag has discouraged potential distributors and buyers alike; the under $1000 specification cannot be reached without sacrificing quality. That is in part do to the materials used to make an ultrathin laptop that is still rigid enough to stand up to normal usage and in part to the philosophy of 'instant on' which requires an SSD to be used as the main storage medium. Eden tells The Inquirer that he sees Windows 8 offering huge potential to the ultrabook thanks to its touchscreen friendly design. He describes devices similar to the ASUS Transformer, a product usable as a touch device like a tablet but with a full keyboard available for when you are doing more than just surfing the web. New Ivy Bridge internals will probably help as well, bringing increased performance and lowered power usage, though probably not doing anything good to the sticker price.

"CHIPMAKER Intel gave its attention at the CES conference to promoting the real-world benefits of ultrabooks.

The company highlighted a design and marketing effort to shift its focus from benchmarks and statistics to examples of real-world capabilities and applications that will be improved by what it hopes will become a growing ultrabook market."

Good news for those of you who have been waiting to upgrade in the hopes that Ivy Bridge will be arriving on time. It seems your patience has paid off but you will have to wait a while longer before you can get your hands on Intel's next tick. You can look forward to more PCIe 3.0 lanes, just like those who've jumped onto the new Sandy Bridge E chips and a bump on the GPU portion of the chip. X-bit Labs doesn't have any pricing for the new chips, but they do list all of the models you will be able to buy. One thing you should note are the impressive TDPs, they may not count as low power CPUs but they're certainly lower than other Intel and AMD chips currently on the market.

"Intel Corp. has notified its partners about its decision to introduce of its next-generation code-named Ivy Bridge processors in the second quarter of 2012. Previously the company planned to release the Core i 3000-series central processing units (CPUs) for desktops in March - April timeframe, which left a possibility to unveil the chips in the first quarter."

Although Intel’s latest Sandy Bridge successor, Ivy Bridge, was slated for a January 2012 launch, the situation is now looking more bleak. According to these slides over at BSN, Intel is delaying Ivy Bridge until at least April. While the top end Core i7 3770 Ivy Bridge processor might be available as soon as Q2 2012, it is also the most expensive part, and usually not the one that the majority of enthusiasts are waiting for. Rather, the important processors to watch for are the mid range and overclocker-friendly Core i5 series which will be available in Q3 2012 at the earliest if the current road-map holds true. The i5 3550 part may come out in Q2 2012 along with the top end i7 CPU; however, the majority of i5 processors will be released as soon as Q3 2012.

Further, the budget Core i3 Ivy Bridge parts are in the same boat as the i5 processors, with at least one (possibly) becoming available along with the top end Core i7 part in Q2 2012 and the rest slowly trickling out over the remainder of the year. While it is generally the case that the top end processor(s) are released first, followed by the lower end and less expensive parts, the delay has pushed back a April release for some of the budget parts to a Summer release. Needless to say, it is less than ideal for those consumers eagerly waiting for certain chips to go on sale. Not to mention that for those adventurous few that were willing to pay top dollar for the top end i7 chip this January now have to wait even longer.

The delay is likely due to Intel wanting to get as much money as possible out of the Sandy Bridge platform, and the lackluster launch of AMD’s Bulldozer products. Intel is likely taking the extra time to refine the new chipsets and the PCIe 3.0 support (that is also not technically rated for PCIe 3.0 speeds, sort of (heh)). On the other hand, Bright Side Of News speculates that the delay may be in part due to various retirements throughout the company requiring more development time in addition to needing more time to flesh out the graphics drivers for the GPU portion of Ivy Bridge processors.

Were you hoping for an Ivy Bridge upgrade early next year? Because of the further delays, will you spring for a top end Sandy Bridge system or wait it out for Ivy Bridge despite the money burning a hole in your pocket? As someone that is still rocking a 1156 system, I was hoping to skip Sandy Bridge and go for Ivy Bridge (I seem to love near-end-to-life sockets); however, with the delays I’m not sure what I’ll be doing now.

Z68, we hardly had time to know you and now you are leaving us; at least the 67 twins were around for a bit. March will be mad for reviewers and tech junkies as Ivy Bridge is scheduled to arrive on the scene. The updated chip moves to 22nm and will also be the first to feature Intel's Tri-Gate transistors which should keep the TDP of even the higher speed models of chip below current generation chips. DigiTimes also lists the models of motherboards that will arrive with the new chip, all half dozen of them.

"Intel is expected to unveil its 22nm Ivy Bridge CPUs in March 2012 at the earliest, with initial offerings focusing on dual- and quad-core models, according to sources at motherboard makers.

The quad-code Ivy Bridge CPUs will have thermal design power (TDP) ratings of 45W, 65W and 77W, while the dual-core models will have TDP ratings of 35W and 55W, indicated the sources.

For the 7-series desktop CPUs, Intel will launch Z77 and Z75 chipsets to replace its Z68 and P67, and a H77 to replace H67. Additionally, Intel will also release Q77, Q75 and B75 chipsets for business models, replacing the Q67, Q65 and B65."

Perhaps not everybody has fond memories of overclocking past architectures with jumpers on motherboards and needing to be able to do math to determine what overclock you want and more importantly if it took or if the system bailed back to default clocks. Those days are behind us now, as the BIOS becomes the UEFI and you can use a mouse to affect changes on your system timings. Bulldozer does offer some complexity to those looking for a challenge but for most it is the unlocked Sandy Bridge processors that are the go to chip for overclockers. According to information VR-Zone picked up at IDF, overclocking the upcoming families of processors will be even easier. Intel has changed quite a bit over recent years, from the extreme of locking all their processor frequencies to making it easy for the enthusiast to push their CPU beyond design specs.

"Ivy Bridge CPUs decouple the main clock finally, following what the coming Sandy Bridge - E Socket 2011 is also implementing. Now, you can overclock the cores and memory without worrying about affecting the I/O and PCIe clocks. But then comes the more interesting piece news. A year later, in early 2013, the pinnacle of Intel's 22 nm process show off, the initial Haswell processor, is expected to go another step further, where CPU core, GPU, memory, PCI and DMI ratios are all set independently here, on top of fine grain BCLK base clock available within the Lynx Point chipset."

Intel's Linux graphics driver is open source and the developers who work on it ensure that their code is publicly available which results in findings such as the one Phoronix is reporting on this morning. While examining the Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver they discovered more information on the triple video output support that Ivy Bridge is supposed to support. It seems that some Ivy Bridge motherboard will sport three DisplayPort outputs which can all be used simultaneously and others a pair of HDMI ports with a D-SUB connector making up the third output. More importantly, because this was found in the Linux driver it becomes obvious that Intel intends to support multi-monitor output on Linux. Watch out AMD.

"Patches were made public by Intel yesterday for their Linux graphics driver that enable "Ivy Bridge" hardware to simultaneously drive three monitors. Thanks to Intel's Linux driver being open-source and their OSTC developers doing the hardware enablement work in public, there's some new details about this triple monitor support for the next-generation Ivy Bridge hardware."